Chapter 7: Personal behaviour
Requirement to treat everyone with respect and courtesy and without harassment
The third element of the Code of Conduct (s. 13(3) of the PS Act) requires employees, when acting in the course of APS employment, to treat everyone with respect and courtesy and without harassment. As reported in Chapter 8 on Diversity, 18% of employees reported that, in 2002–03, they had been subjected to what they considered to be harassment, discrimination or bullying in their workplace.
Two applications for unfair dismissal before the Australian Industrial Relations Commission (AIRC) in 2003 emphasised the importance of this element of the Code. In both cases, APS employees were dismissed for failing to meet these requirements of the Code. While not all breaches of this element of the Code would warrant termination of employment, the relevant decisions of the AIRC articulate how inappropriate behaviour in the workplace is a serious issue with potentially serious consequences. In one decision2 Commissioner Deegan noted that:
Any failure to treat a person or a fellow employee with ‘courtesy and respect’ could conceivably constitute a breach of the Code. Many such breaches would not incur a sanction of termination of employment. In the applicant's case there were numerous, in my view serious, failures to comply with the requirement of subsection 13(3) of the Public Service Act 1999, to treat people with respect and courtesy; many of those failures also constituted harassment.
In the second case3 Senior Deputy President Lacy commented that:
It can be reasonably expected that an employee will not create a hostile work environment or upset other staff in the way that the applicant has done in this case. Employees reasonably can be expected to work harmoniously with one another and have regard to the sensitivities of other people within the workplace. This, it seems to me, is a corollary of an employer's duty to provide a safe and healthy work environment free of hostility and harassment.
In this case the Senior Deputy President also concluded that the expression ‘with respect and courtesy and without harassment’ should be read disjunctively—that is, that an employee would be in breach of the Code if they were disrespectful or discourteous or their conduct was regarded as harassment, rather than having to display all of those behaviours. He also discussed the meaning of the terms ‘respect’, ‘courtesy’ and ‘harassment’.
2 C Deegan, PR 9322560, 5 June 2003
3 SDP Lacy, PR 927240, 3 February 2003